


Sequencing

by MissEllaVation



Category: U2 (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:53:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26048326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissEllaVation/pseuds/MissEllaVation
Summary: Edge’s notes from the spring of 1990. This fic is concurrent with the first couple of chapters ofBeach Sequence. (But you don’t have to have read Beach Sequence to understand this very small, scattered fic.)
Relationships: Bono/The Edge (U2)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 20





	Sequencing

**Author's Note:**

> I posted my most recent fic in March, 2020, just as the covid pandemic was setting in. Between then and now, I wasn’t able to write much. I wanted to write another fic, but I couldn’t settle on an era or a topic—or on much of anything, really. It’s been kind of hard to find that joyful, daydreamy place I usually go to when I write about these guys. So I resorted to an old writing workshop trick: Tell the same story from another character’s point of view. If you happen to be a Beach Sequence fan, you’ll note that things don’t quite match up. Is Bono the unreliable narrator, or is Edge? (Neither. It’s me.)
> 
> Beach Sequence ended up being six chapters long. This is just a one-off. Lucky you. :) It’s really kind of a mess, but I do need to keep writing something. Anything. I’m sure some of you will understand that feeling.
> 
> All of this is to say, this might not be the best thing I’ve written. But as always, it was written with love.
> 
> Thanks to likeamadonna for her continuous encouragement, and for her friendship. Thanks to Bedge people everywhere.
> 
> *Upon re-reading: Edge was not yet 30 in the spring of 1990. He wouldn't even be 29 until that August. But let us just say he could see 30—that tremendously huge number of incredible oldness!—creeping up in his rearview mirror. (Bono would have just turned 30 in this fic.)
> 
> **The Ian McCulloch "mountain goat" quote is real. I read it somewhere when I was 19 or so. But until I can find it, [there is this](https://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/MjAxMS01YTQxNDhhNGJiNzAzMmFm/?tagSlug=music). A quick google demonstrates that all of the musicians who've talked shit about Bono over the years are men, and that most of them have walked it back. Make of that what you will.
> 
> From Merriam-Webster: _Sequence: a succession of repetitions of a melodic phrase or harmonic pattern, each in a new position._

**Track 1**

Bono,

I’m not the writer in the group. If you should happen to run across these notes, you won’t find any epiphanies or big revelations. I’m not you.

But I do keep notes. For example, this gem from last Wednesday, scrawled on the back of a receipt from Spar: “Chorus on Sick Puppy: big muff fuzz—slightly but not too much.” Followed by, “Tea bags, laundry soap” and a series of inky cubes and spheres.

Taking notes on my interior life, however, does not come naturally. But so many things are happening now, and if I should be fortunate enough to grow very old, and if I start to lose track of the days, maybe having these current events down on paper will help me to remember them. And maybe that’s a weird thing for a thirty-year-old to worry about, but I’ve seen my grandparents becoming forgetful, and even my dad will sometimes struggle to recall the name of an actor from a film he’s seen forty times, only to leap off the couch an hour later and yell, “Sydney Greenstreet!”

I don’t suppose I’d want anyone else to read any of this—certainly not my little girls—but I do want to be able to conjure up this strange and unsettled time later, at my leisure. I want to take it apart and study the ragged scraps of melody and the whispered words, and put them back together again in a pleasing shape; in the shape of a song.

**Track 2**

I’m not as unhappy as you think I am. I have to be honest with myself. I may be milking the current situation just a bit. I know the breakup of my marriage will make good fodder for our new record. It’s so much meatier than your own domestic bliss. What songs could possibly come out of those warm parties in your kitchen, or the raucous picnics on the beach, or the overnight jaunts to secluded inns with the baby left in the care of Ali’s parents? (Incidentally, you and Ali were both very clever to wait a few years before having a baby. I wonder sometimes if we had done the same—but no, I won’t rehash that here. This is Ireland; people have babies. Lots of them, and fast. No options, no divorces, no backsies. And I would certainly not want to give back any of my girls.)

But I have to be honest: Most days I feel quite free, like a weight has been lifted from me. I’m a young man in a highly successful band, so I’m pretty sure this separation is not the end of my road in the romantic or sexual sense.

With women, I mean. Sauce for the goose, Bono.

More honesty: I might engage in a bit of playacting here and there. With this face, it’s easy enough to look sad. And yes, I will accept those speculative glances Ali peppers me with when she thinks I don’t see her, as well her good humor and the occasional home-cooked meal.

But the person I pepper with glances? It’s you.

**Track 3**

Rumors of your reckless driving are exaggerated. Slightly. Even so, when I ride with you I always wear my seatbelt, and I hang onto the strap above the passenger-side door, white-knuckling it every so often. The day we drove to Bull Island to take a walk on the beach—because Ali thought I looked “downcast” and told you to take me out for some fresh air—on that cold-but-sunny spring day, you were steering with one hand and singing along with whatever came on the radio.

> _Pump up the jam, a little more, get the party going on the dance floor, see cuz that’s where the party’s at—_

Glancing over for my approval. You were funny, doing a Belgian rapper’s approximation of an American accent. But I didn’t laugh. I was trying so hard not to laugh.

You tell me I have the most deadpan face you’ve ever seen; that I can remain expressionless through almost anything. (Almost anything.) And that day, in the car, I was trying to maintain my reputation as a stoic. But you were just so unnervingly magnetic with the scenery rolling by behind your head. One second you were a character actor from a mafia film. The next second you were a delicate schoolgirl.

“Fucking look at the road, will you?” I said, ten times or more. Because what else could I say?

In the carpark near the beach I complained about the cold. If we were in a movie, and I was a girl, you would have taken off your jacket and draped it over my shoulders. It would have been too big, and the audience would have cooed over us. But you didn’t have a jacket at all, not even for yourself. You said, “I’m sorry, The Edge, I thought the sun would be a little warmer by now,” and I felt like an arse for making you feel bad.

But again: milking the situation.

So I folded my arms across my chest and walked with you into the dunes. I was happy just being alone with you, but I wasn’t going to say so.

**Track 4**

I wanted to touch your face. I wanted to touch it in a very specific way: my right hand on your left cheek, the tips of my fingers spread out along the jut of the bone, my thumb in the cleft of your chin, just skimming your lower lip.

It wasn’t as if we’d never kissed each other before, but the kisses of the past were born out of drunken house parties or post-gig wrestling matches; out of nights we were so proud of ourselves for conquering our fear and just getting through the set. They weren’t face-touching kisses, because face-touching takes some degree of premeditation.

I don’t know what I’m on about, Bono. I just wanted to touch you and kiss you, no matter how it happened. And I thought you wanted me to. But sober, in broad daylight, in the same dunes I’d explored as a child with my dad, I just couldn’t.

**Track 5**

I may be the one whose life is falling apart, but I’m resilient in my way and I’ll make it through. You, on the other hand, are always walking into the world with an open heart, and running into a closed fist.

Nice metaphor, isn’t it? Thank you.

I can’t stand it when interviewers decide in advance that your concern for the world is only for show, and try to manipulate you into saying something insensitive or self-indulgent. I think they resent you for caring so much, because they themselves don’t really care, and your presence reminds them that they’re supposed to. I know what you saw in Central America. I know what you saw in Ethiopia. You took pictures. You showed me; you told me everything—you were more traumatized than you ever let on. You told me about the terror and the nighttime gunfire, about the babies who starved to death while their parents waited for food to arrive. I saw how the grim lines were already becoming set in your sweet face. And I know this is something that will keep happening, well into the future, as there’s no lack of hunger or cruelty in the world.

I’m not sure I’d be capable of doing the things that you can do. I mean, of course I can write a cheque. But you’re completely unafraid to go face-to-face with people on the other side of the world. You never worry that you might make a faux pas, or that you might come off a little bit like the Great White Hope. You are guileless in this sense, and that’s a thing I love about you.

Among many other things.

**Track 6**

You were poring over _NME_ in our pub late one night, about five years ago.

“Listen to this,” you said. “They interviewed Ian McCulloch. He’s watching LiveAid on telly, right? He basically slags off the entire performance. And then he says the following: ‘Bono’s got real fat; he looks like a sodding mountain goat.’”

“Spoken like a jealous prick,” I muttered. Or something to that effect. “Let him say that to my face next time, not over the phone to some spotty music journo.”

“I did look a little portly on camera, maybe.” You puffed out your cheeks to demonstrate.

“Absolute crap. You were working so hard that day, like an athlete. And then you looked so small afterward…when we were all yelling at you.” Your little face under that great big hat, your sad eyes.

Ah, Bono. Ridiculous for you to worry about not fitting the scrawny pop star ideal, when the whole time we were in the pub, a steady stream of women—from barely nubile to well-preserved middle age—approached our table, and all but offered to crawl under it and service you. You wore yourself out being kind, talking to each one sweetly before sending her on her way.

I was not jealous at all, by the way.

“Look,” I said, “you know English bands have to talk shite about everyone who threatens to divert attention from them.”

“A Liverpudlian named McCulloch is barely English, Edge.”

“English enough to act the prick.”

You looked up from the magazine. Not a trace of fat on your face, just a chin that came to a point like the tip of a valentine heart; just wide blue eyes brimming with that dopey look you get when you need extra love. You must have looked up at your mum like that whenever you got in trouble.

**Track 7**

I was remembering that _NME_ pub night while I watched you creep into a dune above Dollymount Beach, where some industrious person had dug just enough to hollow out a little cave for one person to sit comfortably. Your jeans were molded to your ass, to the baroque curves of your calves. I ached to touch you. The idea of there being any less of you was not even to be entertained.

You tried to convince me that we had to sit together inside the little dune-cave because I was cold, and that we could watch the strand and the sea from this slight elevation without anyone bothering us. To this end you scooted backward, spread your legs and patted the smooth sand in between them.

“Really Bono?”

“Really Edge.”

“What if you sit in the little hole in the ground, since it’s so important to you. And I’ll sit out here and just—”

“Get in here.”

“No. You’re ridiculous.”

“Edge, you and I have seen each other in every stage of undress. We’ve seen each other drunk, stoned, and vomiting. We’ve each barged in on the other having a wank in the bathrooms of the most paper-thin American motels...”

“Oh, thanks for mentioning.”

“You were impressive. _‘Shut the fucking door goddammit!’_ I didn’t know you could yell like that.”

“Cheers, mate.”

“I’m just saying, the two of us huddling for warmth in the sand really shouldn’t be a scandal at this point.”

What choice did I have but to agree?

And then to sit there between your legs, to lean back against your warm chest with the wind blowing up from the sea… It felt so good and so right. I couldn’t let you know. If I moved a muscle, if I said a word, if I let one of my hands drift to the hard-soft fullness of your thigh, if I so much as breathed…

You’d a Flake bar in your shirt pocket that we broke in half and shared. Instead of putting my half into my hand, you lifted it right to my lips and murmured, “Body of Christ.” I had a brief vision of myself arriving in Presbyterian hell, something like a bookkeeper’s office in a suburban industrial park. Would any of this be worth it? “This” being your cock shifting against my tailbone while chocolate melted on my tongue.

Well, yes.

**Track 8**

Reasonable people have come to accept that sexual orientation exists on a continuum, and that most of us are not one hundred percent one thing or another. I did believe that I fell much closer to the hetero side of things, but I can’t square that belief with the empirical evidence that you do, in fact, exist. I don’t know what I am, Bono. But I do know that _everyone_ is attracted to you, and this worries me.

In the dunes, you pretended my hair had blown into your eyes so you could have an excuse to push it away, to play with it. I knew what you were up to but I didn’t quite trust you. I was afraid to move. If I moved you might stop. If I moved, you might realize that you’d let your hand rest just a bit too long on my shoulder, that you’d begun to rub my neck in a way that let your thumb brush my earlobe a few times.

Your playing with my hair could almost have been mindless affection. You play with your daughter’s hair; you pet dogs and cats. But when you kissed the spot where my jaw meets my ear, I knew. Apparently there’s something compelling about that particular angle. The missus always liked it. And a woman I saw a few times during the winter once sent me a note that said, “The bones of your face crush my heart.” (An odd visual if you think about it too much.) Nevertheless there we were. Your lips on the heart-crushing spot, and me with my own heart racing, afraid to move.

I told myself, “Bono loves _everyone_.”

I told myself, “Bono touches _everyone_. You’ve seen this happen.”

I told myself, “This is pure absent-mindedness on his part. He thinks you’re Ali, or a puppy, or maybe a particularly nice tree.”

Then those two older women—remember them, Bono? I think they said they were called Maggie and Fiona?—chased their yappy runaway dog right into our dune-cave.

Bono, they figured us out at a glance. I don’t know if you could tell, but I could tell. That they were together. I mean, these two old dears were a couple, like any old husband and wife. And even though we’d sprung apart, and you tried to distract them with flirtation and wit, I knew. I knew something you didn’t know. And that made me feel brave and reckless. I figured it was time to call your bluff. After all, it wasn’t as if we hadn’t been here before. Not in the dunes, but the other stuff. You know.

**Track 9**

“Something different, something different.”

“Yes, but what?”

There is a rebelliousness about you and me. It’s you and me against the world, sneaking off to clubs to listen to industrial bands, hip-hop, and whatever is coming out of Manchester. Maybe we’re a little desperate. We know we’re getting to be thirty, and that thirty is an age of transition in popular music. You either achieve a type of gravitas, or you become irrelevant. When Daltrey sang, “Hope I die before I get old,” he meant, “Before I turn thirty.” Let’s face it. Of course he’s still alive, but what are The Who doing these days? Nothing very interesting.

I never want to think of myself as an establishment figure. I never want to rest on my laurels.

So off we go, you and I, the two weirdos with the weird nicknames and the weird clothes (and my recalcitrant hair), off on our own without our more sensibly-styled rhythm section. There we are, in the dark and bright, shouting into each other’s ears over an insistent beat made in a studio somewhere by other people—people who are still only about twenty-five, probably.

“We can do better, Edge. We can do better than Nine Inch Nails or certainly Happy Mondays.”

“Of course we can, but how?”

You dance closer and closer to me, your flimsy black shirt becoming damp, sticking to your chest. My eyes keep being drawn to the vee of flesh revealed by your unbuttoned buttons. I want to slip my hand inside. I want to touch you like I’d touch a woman. Just like that.

“We’ll just absorb it. We’ll just absorb it, Edge.”

I’ve lost the train of the conversation. “Absorb what?”

“Absorb it, and then see what comes out of us.”

Oh, absorb the music. Right.

A little closer. You press your forehead to mine. This is a little thing we do sometimes, half-believing we can transmit an idea from one brain into the other without using words. Sometimes it works.

But your mouth is so close to mine. Your skin is so hot. My hands hang at my sides, my fists clench. I can’t. I can’t put my hands on you. I can’t pull you closer. This is a marriage of true minds, and only the minds may touch. You pull away for one awful, roaring second, then bury your face somewhere between my neck and shoulder.

_Bono, people will think…_

_Let them think._

**Track 10**

I think the answer to the musical question “something different, yes, but what?” might be found in the b-sides from _The Joshua Tree_. I forced myself to listen to them last night, one after another, whilst sprawled in the front room of my temporary abode, staring up at the dangly bits of the chandelier.

They’re a strange batch of songs that didn’t fit the theme of the album, but could have been an album unto themselves. _U2 After Midnight_ , maybe, filled with little stories of longing and desperation. My guitar sounding mournful, like a soul stretched to the breaking point. Literary flights of fancy, the lights at Summerhill, a billboard painter, the scent of cedar and the sting of nettles, and women described in terms of car accidents and natural disasters.

We were sort of getting used to the fact that people of all kinds wanted to throw themselves into our arms, or crawl into our beds. But we were _trying_ , trying so hard to be so good.

What if we took the “trying to be good” bit out of the equation? What if we called the next record _Fuck Being Good_?

**Track 11**

I watched you in fascination as you wrangled and deflected those two ladies and their little dog. I was still reeling from your hands and your lips; I was struggling to be polite. You looked like something that had swum up to me out of the sea: Hair as dark and tangled as the seaweed streeling along the shoreline, eyes reflecting the sky, bare feet dusted and speckled with sand.

Once the women had gone, I crept in between your legs again and let my head fall backwards onto your shoulder.

“Edge?”

I said nothing, but allowed your warm, solid little hands to continue their explorations of my neck, my forearms, and my chest. When they reached my belt buckle I finally had to break my vow of silence. I spoke your name, and felt the breath rush out of you as your arms pulled me tightly against your chest.

“Edge, Edge,” you murmured, in a dark little wind-roughened voice that I strained to hear. “Edge. I’ve always. I’m sorry, love. Let me.”

You were so tentative, and I was so desperate, that I pulled your hand to me in a way I would never, ever do with a woman. You said, “Yes, love,” and your hand was so warm, and so completely knowing.

Every stupid wrestling match, every beer-and-chips-flavored kiss, and every awful public moment when you touched my hand or tapped my foot with yours where the cameras couldn’t see, just to let me know you were there—everything had always been moving us toward this point of contact between your hand and my body, and I want to shudder at the crude names we attach to this act of selfless intimacy and trust.

I heard you whisper, “Edge, you’re beautiful. Beautiful, Edge,” just before I got lost in hot pulses of sunlight and the cries of reeling birds. And as I was overcome, I was already imagining a hundred different ways I could repay you.

**Track 12**

You drove me home through the dusk. I didn’t yell at you to keep your eyes on the road. Not once. I just watched your hands in awe. I could still taste your fingers, which tasted of me. I knew I wouldn’t feel right until I had you in my house, where I hoped you would give me a chance to make you feel how much I appreciated you, how deeply I’ve always wanted you.

And then, after the most mundane preliminaries, I had you in my bed. You sprawled on your back tugging at my shirt buttons, at the skull-print bandana I’d been wearing. “I like you like this,” you whispered. “My skinny pirate. Rough, wild.”

Beautiful Bono. You didn’t even know. I think even after all this time you still really don’t know. Your eyes were so wide and vulnerable. In a way they were the most naked part of you. I called you Baby and I meant it. The corners of your beautiful wide mouth turned up, and I bent down to kiss one corner, then the other. I kissed your cheeks that looked dusted with cinnamon, the proud biblical arch of your nose, your lips that were the exact color of the tea roses that grow—untended by me—in the garden behind this little borrowed house. I had to hold you immobilized between my legs, I had to look down at you, at all of you. I had to take you in my hand.

“Is this okay?”

“Edge, you beautiful angel. Anything is okay.”

I managed to just study you for another minute. Such a sweet roundness to your limbs, such beautiful dark hair on your chest and belly and… So very male, so very pretty, so fucking confusing, so perfect.

“God, Edge.” You reached for my hand that was encircling us both, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, I had to fall forward until every part of you was touching every part of me, and we rolled and ground against each other, and left marks in each other’s flesh. The pleasure was profound and also absurd—who could have known there was such a deep vein of lust under the surface of our friendship? We broke away from one of the longest, hardest, darkest kisses I had ever experienced, just so we could laugh at ourselves.

But oh, your skin. Your warmth. Your hair knotted around my fingers. My tongue, my teeth traveling the length of your neck. How you rocked against me, your legs twisting around mine.

“I want to make you come,” I whispered. “Like you did for me.”

“Edge.”

“Sweetheart, come.”

You’re a man of words, and words always set you free. I felt it, I felt you, every pulse of you; I heard you cry out my name, and I watched your face become an exquisite mask of pleasure. I watched you until I couldn’t anymore.

**Hidden Track**

You rolled away from me and threw one arm across your eyes. “I have to go home now, Edge. I’m sorry.”

Not the words I wanted to hear at the end of an hour of long, intense looks and sleepy kisses. I tried to convince you to stay the night. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. “Just ring her. Say you were drinking and don’t want to drive.”

It would be a lie, but it would be alright, because we loved each other. Didn’t we love each other? Hadn’t this always been the case? Not that either of us would say it.

“It’ll be alright, Bono.” I kissed the hollow of your chest. In the dim lamplight, I studied the way the dark hair grew around your right nipple, which was the same color as your lips, which was the same color as the head of your cock.

“It’s my fault. I’m always looking for more. More everything. Something to fill that…” You made vague circles with your hand. “You know, I’ve never felt like I had a real home, Edge. Not really. And now sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, in that ridiculously big house on that ridiculous street, and I think, ‘What is this? What does any of this have to do with me?’”

I could have reminded you that we had quite recently brought each other to heights of ecstasy in a house I was merely borrowing from a friend, but I thought it best not to.

I don’t think about home that much, at least not in the way you do—as a place in the world where you are actually meant to belong. It was just never a concern for me. My parents had moved out of the house where I grew up, but I knew that if I had to go to them, in their new house, they would have to take me in, and it would feel fine.

“Look.” I lifted your hand, and pressed your palm flat to my chest, over my heart. “Do you feel this?”

A flicker of a smile. “Yes, Edge.”

“Good. You can go wherever you have to go, whenever you’re ready. But this”—I pressed your hand to my chest, even harder—“ _this_ is your home.”

I held you till you stopped shaking. Then I let you go.


End file.
